HOW TO BE ALWAYS WELL Part I


Dr. Jackson’s book explains the basics of natural hygiene/nature cure and makes recommendations for lifestyle and diet that lead to permanent health and a high degree of well-being. This book is especially useful for the type of person that makes life choices and determines their behaviour according to well-grasped basic principles.


(12th edition.).

Publishers: Print-Craft, Ltd., Toronto. Price: 3 dollars. Obtainable from the Homoeopathic Publishing Co.

THIS is a wonderful and amazing book, a book unique in all literature. Dr. Jackson, an orthodox doctor, was born nearly eighty years ago and he was born a weakling. He painfully grew up, became desperately ill when a relatively young man, was told by the greatest doctor of his time that his condition was hopeless, that he had only a few months to live. All the best treatments had been tried, but in vain. Apparently he was destined to die. As orthodox medicine had failed, Dr. Jackson bethought himself of Nature.

He simplified his way of living, rejuvenated himself, became a healthy, strong man, and now at the age of nearly eighty, possesses the body of a young man and can perform the most remarkable feats of strength, agility and endurance like a trained athlete of twenty-five of thirty.

His book is perhaps the most extraordinary health book ever written. This journal has been fortunate enough to secure the permission of the distinguished author to reprint considerable portions of his wonderful book. I venture to give some brief extracts in this issue and in the following issues which, I am sure, will induce many readers to order the book and to study it and learn from the experience of its writer.

Physically and mentally Dr. Jackson is a young man and he keeps himself in perfect training. He lives on the simplest food, works from twelve to sixteen hours a day, lecturing, advising, teaching, preaching, and his book will remain a classic for ages.– EDITOR, “HEAL THYSELF.”.

“It was not so many years after the great Sir William Osler and many other internationally-known physicians consigned me to the scrap heap, to die inside of four months, because my blood pressure stood at 212 and my heart beats were chaotic; they had lost all resemblance to the normal heart rhythm. I was seriously advised always to be prepared for the end.

Yet, within four years, after I had studied out the normalizing health regimen which I am about to describe, I climbed the fifty flights of stairs in the Washington Monument: the only one of twelve who attempted it to go above the eighteenth floor, and I was five years the oldest of any of the twelve, two of them being under thirty. I also walked down. And this on a hot and humid day, the 4th of July– in hot and humid Washington.

“Let me say that my physicians were fully justified in their gloomy prognosis upon the ground of family history alone; for my father was one of a family of twelve children, all of whom died of heart disease; my father at the age of forty-three, the oldest of any of the family at the time of dying; my fathers father died of heart disease, and I have one sister and one brother dead of heart disease. My mother was a heart case, confined mostly to bed for fourteen years, in the middle period of which I was born.

“For this reason, I fully agreed with their prognosis. Judged by all the canons of medical art, I was doomed.

“Three-quarters of a century ago I was born on the frontier, one of delicate twins; born of a mother who was for fourteen years a heart case. I was elected for artificial feeding, in the days before the science of hygiene was born. Primitive as conditions of life are on the frontier to-day, and correspondingly unhygienic, no reader will have difficulty in appreciating how much more primitive and unhygienic conditions were in those days before hygiene was thought of.

“Born and bred under such conditions, I grew a weakling, and took all the diseases of infancy, childhood, adolescence and young manhood, which would require too much space even to catalogue. At thirty-two I crashed completely, losing all control of my musculo-nervous mechanism; had recurring illusions, delusions and hallucinations of many kinds.

Followed practically all the diseases of the digestive tract, save cancer. At the inlet of the digestive tract, I lost eight teeth from a violent pyorrhoea. At the outlet a fistula and fissure in ano had to be operated upon without anaesthesia, because I was so physically degenerated it was unsafe to anaesthetize me.

” A violent ulcerative colitis often eroded blood vessels and all but bled me to death. For years I was confined to bed two or three days every second week with migraine or sick headache. At forty-four I was physically deformed with neuritis and arthritis, and so remained for six years, until I changed my living habits. At forty-five my heart condition became so acute, I was confined to the ground floor for life as already stated.

“At the forty-nine I was given only four years of sight, from chronic glaucoma. I then could not count fingers with my left eye. At the same time I lost my sense of smell, the hearing of my left ear and my sense of taste.

“The proper treatment for my glaucoma was considered to be operative, an iridectomy, but my physical debility ruled this out because of the almost certainty of infection and immediate blindness.

“At fifty, my heart was so nearly destroyed, I could climb the three steps to my ground floor only one at a time, and on reaching the top one I was blind, breathless and dizzy, and had to hold on to the door frame until vision returned; my heart sounds could be heard four feet distant and the heart movements were so violent they could be seen through my clothing at an equal distance.

“It was at that period that the greatest physician of our time, many say the greatest physician of all time, the great Sir Wm. Osler, gave me but four months to live.

“No human being can live an entirely normal– or healthy– life feeding entirely upon any unnatural food or foods. Even infants cannot live upon milk alone and keep well when it has been changed by such a short heating at low temperature as is required to pasteurize it, but especially if heated to the point where it will be sterilized by heat. Thus delicate are natures balances.

“And yet the chemist can find no property or quality in fresh, natural, unsterilized milk that cannot be found in sterilized milk. In natural milk and in all other natural foods there are subtle vitalizing principles that scientists know are there, yet neither chemistry nor any other branch of science can locate and identify them. Yet, they are very easily disturbed or destroyed. Natures products are perfect, as we ought to know, and she permits us to do very little messing about with them under the delusion that we are improving them.

“Still we do mess about with them as if we do not know this tremendously vital truth. We refine and sift and otherwise daintify. We factory cook and toast and shred and puff and malt and otherwise prepare our cereal foods; we thoroughly bleed and hang and age and chill our flesh foods and remove bone and blood, cartilage and the internal organs; we cook and can and salt down and chemically and otherwise preserve our flesh foods so that it is sometimes many months after an animal is killed and its flesh separated from its vitalizing Life Principle that it is eaten.

We are fools enough to make our most frequently used foodstuffs as unnatural as possible and at the same time talk learnedly of the inviolability of the laws of nature. We do this, knowing all the time that to make a thing unnatural is to break the law of its nature, then we close our eyes to the natural consequences and in vast scientific effort set ourselves to search in the most unnatural directions for the causes of these so-natural consequences.

“And milk is no exception to the rule. We often start with the feeding of the cattle to make our milk supply unnatural. Cattle are frequently fed upon patent stock foods which, while they may stimulate a large yield of milk, and the chemist may find in it all the elements that chemistry can find in milk produced upon the best natural fodder, still it lacks the vitalizing qualities or properties of natural milk, or of milk produced by naturally fed cows.

“The ingredients of many of the stock foods are largely made up of the offal from human food factories, offal being that which human food experts are in the habit of removing from or refining out of the foods that God made perfect foods for men, in order that these God-made, perfect foods may be man-improved (?).

“Some of this offal comes from flour and cereal mills; some from distilleries and breweries; some from beet sugar refineries; some, as molasses, from cane sugar refineries; the cheapest sorts, of course, entirely overloaded with salts, as pointed out already in another section; some from many sources, but all are as unnatural as are our human foods. The milk derived from them must be, and is, equally unnatural; the cattle so fed almost equally diseased to the civilized beings who compel them to eat and manufacture milk upon such foods.

“When it is the commonest knowledge among physicians that the vitamins, but especially the antiscorbutic vitamin C, are reduced or disappear from milk when the cows are simply changed from grass to hay, it can be well imagined what effect this degradation of the foods of our milk cows must have upon the vitalizing properties of the milk supply of civilization.

Robert G. Jackson
Dr. Robert G. Jackson, was born in 1867. In 1903, he took admission in Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia.
In 1914, when Dr. Robert G. Jackson M.D. was in his 40s, he developed a severe case of arthritis (probably rheumatoid arthritis) and when he was 49, his doctors gave him four years to live. He refused to accept the diagnosis and began to exercise more and sleep with his bedroom windows open. Long before such things were popular, he developed a health food diet of fruits, vegetables and his own line of health foods including Roman Meal bread. This bread was fashioned after the multi-grain bread ate by the Roman legions and included wheat, barley, oats, spelt and rye. Disease,” he said, “was due solely to man’s stupidity.”

Jackson started the Roman Meal Co. to manufacture his special diet foods. He went on lecture tours where he attracted large audiences. He bragged that “I am growing younger every year.” By 1930, at age 72, and in good health, he was a millionaire. He died in 1941 from complications of a broken hip. Roman Meal bread is still available in the United States.